Indie dev says Google AI somehow leaked detail about their game that was totally private

A solo indie dev has revealed that Google AI was able to leak “scarily real” details about upcoming content in their game that was only written in private documents.

Artificial intelligence remains a hot topic within the games industry, as many developers have begun embracing it when creating their projects, while others have vowed to stay away. Now, the dev behind an indie title has added more fuel to the debate, as they claim that AI was actually able to access unrevealed content for their game.

In a Reddit post, KlubKofta, the solo creator of tower defense game Operation Octo on Steam, shared screenshots from Discord that showed a player asking Google’s Gemini AI “silly questions” about the game.

Solo devs say Gemini leaked character name that hadn’t been revealed

After receiving some answers that contained “surprisingly obscure info,” KlubKofta urged the player to ask about future content. To their surprise, the AI managed to produce the name of a character that hadn’t been made public yet.

“Somehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name ‘Vantage Tripod,’ which I had never mentioned to anyone,” the dev explained, before saying that this detail had only ever been written in a Google Doc that hadn’t been shared online.

“As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI!”

As some replies pointed out, Google automatically opts users in to having their Drive files scanned to help train Gemini. However, in a response to Polygon, the company denies that private documents can be searched.

“Google does not scan your private Workspace content (which includes Drive and Docs) to train our foundational AI models (including Gemini),” the statement said. “Links to publicly shared docs may be indexed if someone posted them somewhere publicly, where they could be seen by search engine crawlers.”

Despite this, the OP says the Doc containing the character name had never been shared anywhere, so they have “no idea how it knew all this.”